Review: David Hyde Pierce Breathes Life Into Adam Bock's A LIFE

The tensest, most dramatic moments in director Anne Kauffman's premiere production of Adam Bock's A Life occur whenever designer Laura Jellinek's large unit set slowly rotates horizontally, like a rotisserie, to change locations. The loud extended creaking that accompanies every change sounds like something is about to snap and make the whole thing collapse.

Fortunately, there have been no reports of accidents during the preview period.

We live, we die and some people believe what happens in between is written in the stars is all you might get out of this 85 minute meditation.

It begins with the charming and comically agile David Hyde Pierce delivering a nearly half-hour long monologue as Nate, a lonely man with an optimistic charm about him.

He chats about past lovers, his dead-end job and of having parents who preferred not to address the subject of his being gay. Was his recent breakup, not to mention the rest of his sad life, predetermined at birth? Nate whips out his astrological chart and explains in detail how it may be so.

Given the play's title and its astrological content, it's not surprising that the bulk of the piece concerns someone's death and its aftermath.

There's the obligatory scene where people who make their living from dealing with dead bodies, in this case a mortician and her assistant preparing a corpse to look nice for a funeral, casually chit-chat while the proof of human mortality lies before them.

And, as foreshadowed by Nate in his opening monologue, there's the realization that the truth is sometimes hidden for us to discover.

But while the cast, which also includes Brad Heberlee, Marinda Anderson, Nedra McClyde and Lynne McCollough, is perfectly fine and the dialogue is sometimes interesting and/or amusing, the play never seems set on a purpose beyond its simple, familiar themes.

A LIFE would be best recommended to middle-aged male actors looking for good monologue material.

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